I WAS ELECTED TO PARLIAMENT, THE KNESSET, IN 1988. I was thirty-three years old, quite young to be a member of the Knesset, maybe too young. Were I elected today, knowing what I know now, I would be a better member of parliament, serving my constituents much better. In my first years, I wasn’t sharp and precise enough. I don’t want to unpack my long career from the limited perspective of that youth who saw through the old and foolish emperor’s new clothes, nor as an active and involved player whose nakedness was also exposed, but as a somewhat distant observer with considerable experience. At a certain moment, I realized that I was part of the empire, the government, and the kingdom. That’s life. Youth is lost, and the empire is almost always naked even when you are part of it. And when there is nakedness, your private parts are also exposed.
Reuven Rivlin, a close personal friend and now the state president, told me, “My father used to say that the higher the donkey goes up on the ladder, the more his backside is visible.” It took me a very long time to understand the essence of the Knesset: where the ladders are, and who sees what of whom. When I understood, I didn’t always have partners for conversation and action on the basis of this understanding, and I wasn’t always an appropriate partner for others.
It began badly. In the past, parliamentary correspondents would summarize in the press the first plenary session of the new parliament members, an attempt of sorts to predict who is a flash in the pan and who is made of long-term parliamentary stuff. At first I didn’t know to which category I belonged. No wonder, therefore, that my activity was summed up this way by one of the more malicious reporters: “Avrum Burg is wandering the corridors of the Knesset like an alien connected to his beeper and waiting for a message from another planet.” This is a quote whose accuracy I didn’t bother to check in the archives. It was engraved in me verbatim, like a searing brand that will never be forgotten. It’s difficult to describe my shock when I read those words, the insult and fear of the terrible failure I faced. And worst of all—he was right. I watched haplessly as my colleagues were making their mark in the media and being appreciated, legislating, joining debates in the plenum and committees, and expressing opinions in faction meetings, while I remained mute at best, inarticulate at worst. I invested my energy in gimmicks and blunt statements in order to get some media attention, but as someone told me in an off-the-cuff comment at the time, “You won’t get anywhere because you’re not hungry for anything.” He too was right, and my spirits were very low. I needed fame, but I wasn’t hungry for it—because I was already a bit famous. I didn’t pursue unimportant legislation just to get into the Knesset statistics books, and I didn’t try to rack up as many speeches and parliamentary questions as I could on patently marginal issues.
I wanted to deal with the pure issues for which I had entered the public meat grinder. I wanted to deal with history and substance. But to my chagrin, I discovered that I had come to the wrong address. In the main public arena, the Israeli Knesset, there is virtually no activity dealing with the central issues of Israeli society. It is a junction where all interests meet and collide, like a very busy street market. A real arena, with struggles, violence, and all the rest. A lot of tactical realities, but surprisingly little strategic substance. Religious people of various shades don’t meet in synagogue but in the Knesset, where they fight and quarrel with the full force of their beliefs. Jews and Arabs don’t encounter each other anymore on city streets or in places of work because ethnic separation is very effective here. The same goes for new immigrants and longtime residents, the city center and the suburbs, the bourgeoisie and socialists, religious and secular people, and so on. For all these groups, all that remains is the Knesset plenum, and therefore the friction there is sometimes violent to the point of physical altercation. The Knesset deals with many day-to-day matters, and usually it suffers from a huge and unnecessary load of minor current affairs and pettiness. Knesset members live in their own tree and don’t always see the Israeli forest, with the demons and wild animals prowling it.
At that time, I had two sails propelling my political boat forward. The sail of separation of religion and state, and the sail of peace, both powered by the wind of one person—my teacher and guide, the late professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz. From my childhood to the day of his death, his figure was like light and shadow, part of my life. Today’s Jerusalem is almost empty of its original children and packed with immigrants from the West—especially from the United States and France—with their luxury apartments. In the early days of the Israeli enterprise when I was young, the city was much smaller, but its people loomed large. Martin Buber and S. Y. Agnon, David Flusser and Marcel Dubois, Miriam Yellin-Steklis and Zelda, Israel Eldad and Yeshayahu Leibowitz walked the streets like ordinary people. You could approach them on a street corner. You could often see people buttonholing one of these celebrities and launching into long-winded debate or a discussion of current events. Leibowitz was always there—a long-legged intellectual with a crooked back, gangly with a spring in his step, carrying a battered leather case and wearing a thin-brimmed hat, his expression half enigmatic and half curious, watching the world and criticizing it.
Over the years, I had the privilege of getting closer to Leibowitz, studying with him and learning from him, so I considered myself the representative of his values and path in the Knesset. Then I still lived an Orthodox life and I ignored the structural contradiction at the root of his worldview, the contrast between his wonderful openness and the rigidity of Jewish law to which he was committed. From time to time, I found issues in the Knesset that I took up, but most times I returned home sad, depressed, and with a sense of missed opportunity. The amendment to the “pork law”—whether it could be permitted to import pork to the Jewish state, something that was “unheard of and un-thought of” according to the common coalition hypocrisy—was a sad example of how matters proceeded. In my view the original law, like the proposed amendment, was pure religious coercion. A prostitution of religious values for the sake of rabbinic interests, the work of kippah-wearing religious thugs. The law was characteristic of the religious establishment’s cynical use of its political power. It stood in stark contrast to my view of the desired relationship between religion and state.
In my vote, I wanted to apply what I had imbibed in Leibowitz’s home on Ussishkin Street in Jerusalem when I was young—complete separation of religion and state. But the Labor faction imposed factional discipline, because, as always, the fate of the coalition depended on this vote. “If we don’t stand together as one, the religious parties will withdraw,” “the ultra-Orthodox politicians will be angry,” and “Rabin and Peres may go back to quarrelling with one another” or, God forbid, fall from power. And any rookie Knesset member knows this: power is not the main thing—it’s the only thing. I abstained from the vote and felt like a spineless, gutless rag. And there were many more such votes.
In my first term, 1988–1992, the media published several stories about mistakes by ritual circumcisers or medical complications caused by neglect during circumcisions. As was customary in parliament, I immediately submitted a bill to regulate the entire circumcision realm. It kicked around the corridors, got reasonable media coverage, and in the end, did not receive a shred of support in the ministerial committee for legislation. I still wanted to raise the issue for a Knesset vote, and suddenly the pressure was on. Ministers and directors-general, the prime minister himself and his lackeys became overnight experts on the cutting-edge subject for Jewish newborns. It turned out that, again, the resilience of the always-fragile Israeli coalition was hanging by a thread. And, again, as usual, the ultra-Orthodox parties threatened. And, again, as usual, the leaders of the country were scared and scrambling. Meetings were arranged for me with current and former chief rabbis, with representatives of the ritual circumcisers and of the Israeli Medical Association. They all made pilgrimages to me, made promises and broke them, deceived me, threatened me with fifty shades of threats, and in the end, as expected, the coalition easily survived. The bill was defeated in deafening silence.
A large majority was mobilized against my vote and the votes of a few assertive members of the opposition who happened to be in the plenum. The ritual circumcisers continued to work without medical training and supervision, and all the promises I was given were ignored. And on the other hand, at the same time I managed to pass an amendment to the law requiring the leashing of dogs. The lesson couldn’t have been more bluntly clear: I can legislate regarding dogs, because they have no rabbinate and party hacks, they have no power in the coalition nor the ability to make threats or break promises. But God forbid I should touch the tip of a newborn baby’s penis, because on him rests the future of the entire Jewish people, or at least that of a few politicians who claim to represent it. From that point on I virtually stopped making the effort to pass bills and legislate just for the sake of statistics and unimportant laws.
These disappointments and many others compelled me to look inward, deeper, into the essence of being a parliamentarian. There are two possible models. The first is the vanishing breed, the public servant, who in addition to his personal urges is motivated by a real sense of mission. The second, proliferating like weeds, is nothing but a public scarecrow or political technician. When I recognized this crossroads, I knew what I did not want to be. I didn’t want to grow old in the temple of democracy and become a tired priest, like that venerable member who told me at one faction meeting, “I was always against the war in Lebanon.” And I, who remembered every one of them and their evasive excuses, didn’t quite recall his resolute stance. At the height of that war of lies I had requested a meeting with him, when I was still a young activist, and I had a different recollection of his position.
“Really?” I interjected. “I don’t remember.”
“Of course,” he said. “I even wrote an anonymous poem in the Maariv newspaper against the war.” I didn’t want to be a poet like him.
Parliamentary life is very intense, especially when you’re finding your way like me and running around all day in search of yourself. It doesn’t leave any time for reflection and thought. Long days at the Knesset and other days, just as long, of politics, voters, party branches and institutions, recruiting support, and endless conversations with constituents. In order to preserve the family and sanity, and to recharge, we strictly observed certain guidelines at home. Friday and Saturday were always devoted to the children, and the annual vacation was greatly anticipated and a source of strength and renewal. At the time, we liked to travel down to the Sinai Peninsula, not only because of the soothing wide-open spaces, but also because of the message to the children—you can travel abroad by car. We wanted them to know that the Israeli reality is not only a siege wall on all sides; it also has breaches of peace, like the southern border crossings. Precisely there, as far as possible from the commotion in Jerusalem, from the tension, from the brutal competition and scathing criticism, I gained an understanding of the new reality I was living in.
We were on a hike in the high mountains of Sinai, along with friends, Bedouin escorts, a few camels, and the expanses of creation. For many hours, I walked behind a camel and thought. An irrepressible mental association ran an old Talmudic saying through my head again and again: “One who sees a camel in a dream—death was decreed against him from heaven and he was saved from it.” I thought about the gap between the negative Jewish image of the camel and the great love, dependence, and appreciation felt by the Bedouin for their camels. There are those who think that the camel is an expression of what is bad in the world and others think that it is the source of vitality in the world. And the camel? He’s the same camel, what does he care. So why do I care so much about what certain people or others think of me? I’m a camel walking in the desert. Sometimes I drink, sometimes I’m thirsty. All I lack is the camel’s patience. To walk slowly and go far. That was one of the two times in which I altered the pace of my life. I returned changed from that vacation in Sinai. I was done with ingratiating myself, and I let go of much of the drivel associated with exclusively media-directed behavior. I had searched for and found part of myself.
IN THOSE DAYS IN THE EARLY 1990S, THE LABOR PARTY was mired in another one of its deep crises. The years-long partnership with the conservative Likud Party in coalition governments had effectively eliminated the existence of an opposition as a vital supplier of alternatives in Israeli politics. My party had simply given up its role as a genuine alternative, surrendered, and committed hara-kiri. We were treated as a venerable old lady, sometimes respected because of her past, and sometimes a barely tolerated nuisance. We occasionally provoked anger because of our inability to let the Likud govern without helicopter parenting. Fatigue had spread throughout the system, and another election defeat seemed closer than ever. And this in the wake of a searing and painful failure in trying to unseat Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir by means of a not particularly successful political maneuver. “The stinking maneuver,” Rabin called it in his dry, colorful language. Gloom settled over us. Together and as individuals, we had reached a low point. And we didn’t know then that there were even lower ones ahead.
On the eve of Yom Kippur in 1991, I left a meeting of the Knesset Finance Committee with Haim Ramon, a veteran Labor lawmaker and the architect of “the stinking maneuver.” Ramon’s face reflected reality—pale and desperate. “Avrum, we’re lost,” he told me. I was, at the time, a political novice, without much understanding of loss and success. I sensed that I had an opportunity to connect with politics with the tools that I knew. Like that camel, walk slowly but go far. “Haim, I have an idea,” I told him. “Let’s draw up a position paper with all ‘our’ issues and go for broke. Against the old folks, against the establishment, against all the disgusting people, come what may. At worst, we’ll die standing tall and not like dishrags.” This collegial discussion led to a document of principles that was original and novel in the political landscape of the time. We recruited our immediate friends and a few pillars of the party and presented the party convention with “the Document of Ten,” a statement of principles on behalf of ten parliament members and central party figures that offered a good alternative to the moldy ideology of the Labor Party. We intended to employ all our political energy to promote these principles at the coming party convention.
The statement of principles endorsed the immediate reform of the Labor Party’s corrupt linkage with Israel’s organization of trade unions as well as with the unions’ health service organizations. Our statement sowed the first seeds of the Oslo agreements, and it was the beginning of the change from socialist hypocrisy (“Bolshevik,” we called it among ourselves) to a much more contemporary social-democratic worldview. That party convention was eventually convened and was cast in advance as a generational struggle. Our young political group against the old, worn “rest of the world.” I’m not convinced that anyone in the future will ever consider those days historic. But there was something like it then.
Haim Ramon gave a wonderful speech at the convention, where he described the fading labor movement as a whale committing suicide. He portrayed the Labor Party as a whale swimming to shore to die there, and how he, Haim Ramon, with his “meager resources” was trying to save it from its suicidal fate. I was in the audience and was very moved. It’s not often that you have the privilege of being present at a public birth, the birth of a leader. Then Yossi Beilin took the stage and presented our political thesis. It was worth living through the previous decade, from the Lebanon War up to the decision by the convention, to feel with all my soul that we were moving the wagon that was stuck. We were agents of change, and we had influence.
In the afternoon, it was my turn. The time had come for discussion of issues of religion and state, and I had the honor of raising the subject on behalf of our group. None of my colleagues remained; political solidarity doesn’t always function perfectly. Few of my partners considered the subject important, and none of them believed that it was really possible to change anything in this area. The atrophied religious status quo was the comfort zone where everyone felt good hunkering down. The fact that I had come from another place—religious Zionism—with the public status I enjoyed gave me a perspective that was a bit higher and broader, and I could see the sickness of the system with my own eyes. Everywhere I went I felt religious extremism: in my family circle, in the fiery speeches in the synagogues, in the size of the kippahs and women’s head coverings among my former friends from my yeshiva past, in the length of the ritual fringes, in the condescension and resentment toward secularism and secular people, and the disconnection from family that the missionaries of return to religion had imposed on their victims. I identified the breaches that religious and ultra-Orthodox politics were going to open in the Israeli body politic. On the other side, I could already hear the beating of the tom-toms in the secular jungle, the hatred of the ultra-Orthodox, which would soon produce the Shinui Party with the hostile, almost anti-Semitic and blunt agenda of its late leader, Tommy Lapid.
I thought that our proposal for separating religion and state was a complete structural alternative that could save Israel from the one issue that has the real potential of causing bloodshed: internecine strife and civil war over issues of the identity of our undefined state. “I don’t entirely agree with you,” one of my partners told me, “but go for it, anyway, it doesn’t have a chance.” I spoke, I thought, persuasively. I felt that the audience was listening to me, that it was thirsty and yearning for a totally different message on a subject that, while not at the center of political reality, stirred anger in everyone encountering it. My speech was over and well received, a few other comments later and the chairman of the convention counted the votes, and lo and behold, our “gang of ten” proposition won the majority.
It is difficult to describe the uproar that erupted in the convention hall. Loud applause. Hugs along with cries of distress. The industrious, hard-working party hacks summoned the mythic heads of the party, Rabin and Peres, and all the rest of their comrades. The chairman, a consigliere for dirty jobs with a clean image, requested another vote. And I tried to again persuade those who had just joined the debate. The scene played out again, and again I won the vote. It was a great moment, perhaps the highest point I had ever reached in public life. I was practicing the politics of values and meaning, and I was happy. For a few hours, I experienced all the excitement of power and influence, and all in the name of ideas and the mission that I believe in to this day.
I didn’t know that precisely at that moment my public position was in jeopardy. Greatness and smallness were apparently intertwined when they were brought into this world. The main headline of one of the important papers announced, “Avrum Burg put a gun to the head of the Labor Party.” And the subhead sharpened the message: “And he pulled the trigger.” In another paper my dear father was quoted: “Avrum has lost his chance to be elected to the next Knesset.” And Dad, who understood old-style politics better than anyone else, really thought so. I wasn’t really insulted, because his voice was part of a huge chorus that was trying to understand what had happened. I was part of a reshaping of the Israeli conversation. He and they were still stuck in the past, and I was already in the new era, which ultimately responded completely differently than he had expected.
The next internal elections of the Labor Party were held in 1992 for the first time ever as a primary among the party’s members. Hundreds of thousands of them. To the surprise of all, I came in first place. Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin were hysterical. In my heart, quietly, I reassured myself: What do they know about religion and state? Give them the army and soldiers, deniable atomic bombs, settlers and political operators, and they will prove their buoyancy and swimming skills, two world freestyle champions. But just confront them with something that has to do with the essence of Judaism and Israeli identity, and the two greats of the generation lose their way and their composure. All the “big chiefs” like Rabin and Peres cared about were the elections around the corner, the coalition with the religious and ultra-Orthodox that they had dreamt would return them to power and the pleasures of compromise.
For three weeks, the entire national leadership of the party exerted heavy pressure on me, sent messengers, and expected me to take the chestnuts out of the fire for them by withdrawing my proposal and betraying my values. Some did it in candid conversations, in promises intended to be broken the minute they were given, and with smooth talk. Others spoke to me with direct and indirect threats, including the cold frowns of Rabin himself. They and their aides were not averse to any media manipulation possible. I stubbornly persisted, and the situation became a Catch-22: if the decision were overturned, they would lose the support of the young people who backed me, those who had had enough of the religious establishment, and of the emphatically secular element that traditionally supports the party. On the other hand, if the decision stood, they would have nearly no room for maneuvering with their religious coalition partners. They were caught between me and them. In the end, the party’s institutions, its central committee and convention, convened and approved an embarrassing formulation in tortuous Shimon Peres style, whose essence was this gambit: even though the party convention made the famous decision three weeks ago regarding separation of religion and state, it actually didn’t intend to separate religion and state, and so on and so forth. Both yes and no, and also maybe, both for and against the religious parties, and vice versa. I saw the sea of hands go up. The very same hands that supported me just a few weeks earlier removed me now from their agenda.
I stood in the hall choked with tears, small, pitiful, and humiliated. I had looked to the great Shimon Peres, and discovered, not for the last time, how callous his opportunism and hypocrisy could be. It was the lowest point of my political career. Until then, my actions in the political arena had been driven by values, principles, and beliefs. Every morning I got up for my public work with a clean and sincere heart. If this were to happen today, now that I’m experienced and scarred, I would react differently. I would get up and leave. But then I didn’t have the resolve. I submitted to the harsh decree and to the cynicism of the decision. I said to myself, “That’s how it is in politics. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.” Or, “It’s worth compromising because we still have many great tasks ahead: peace, justice, equality.” I applied many mechanisms of self-deception so that I wouldn’t do what might have been expected of me—to flee as far as possible. Not so much because of the substance of the issue or because of the public atmosphere that surrounded this small loss, but because with all the background noise and voices, I had stopped listening to myself. I accepted the quasi-democratic verdict and bowed my head.
It was the moment in which I told myself one of the two political lies that shaped my life. Separation of religion and state was not just another issue or compromise, one of many that any person is compelled to make in the course of his life, certainly if he is a political person who understands that politics entails constant compromise with existing possibilities. The minute I surrendered to Peres’s machinations, I stopped being a man of substance and became a professional politician. I gave up on my mission for the sake of my career. I compromised on my internal identity in return for my external status. That was not how I understood matters then. It took me many more years to be able to look back without anger and understand that I had been wrong. If the captain of a ship is off by a millimeter in the vicinity of Malta and does not correct himself in time, he may ultimately reach Australia and not America. Those minutes, between the euphoria of pure achievement and the humiliation of odious compromise were my millimeter, my Malta. I got lost there, and I didn’t find my true path again until I completely left the political track, freed myself from my previous bonds, and learned how to navigate anew and differently with my internal compass.
It was, however, precisely the hiding and disguise that made my public breakthroughs possible. During fifteen short years, from 1988 to 2003, the deeper I concealed my values and ideology, thoughts and understanding, the more I succeeded in climbing up the ladder. Member of Knesset, committee chairman, Jewish Agency chairman, Knesset speaker. And the horizon was still open and inviting. Sometimes when I analyze election results I sense that Israelis want to choose the politician who deludes them better than the others. The voter and the elected representative both know that it’s a fraud. But for a moment, the moment of elections, there is hope, and for the sake of that, leaders who destroy hope are elected time and again. To tell the truth, it wasn’t so hard to attain those positions. The secret was restraint, holding the stormy winds inside and appearing outwardly in the moderate garb that everyone loves so much, “because that’s what everyone does.”